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John Frederick Kensett"White House and Trees, " John Frederick Kensett, Hudson River School, New Jerseycirca 1853
circa 1853
About the Item
John Frederick Kensett
White House and Trees, circa 1853
Oil and gouache on paper
6 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches
Provenance:
Estate of Vincent Colyer (1824 - 1888)
By descent
Paul Magriel Collection
Private Collection, Long Island
Exhibited:
New York, The Finch College Museum of Art; Southampton, New York, The Parrish Art Museum; New Orleans, Louisiana, Isaac Delgado Museum of Art; Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk Museum of Art; Montclair, New Jersey, Montclair Art Museum; New London, Connecticut, Lyman Allyn Museum; Manchester, New Hampshire, The Currier Gallery of Art; Providence, Rhode Island, Rhode Island School of Design; Youngstown, Ohio, The Butler Institute of American Art, American Drawings (Benjamin West to the present) from the Paul Magriel Collection, June 1961 - December 1962.
Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, April 14 - May 15, 1963.
Boston International Fine Art Show at the Cyclorama, Lincoln Glenn, October 19 - 23, 2022.
In the 1850s through 1860, John Frederick Kensett, painted a series of at least five landscapes of the "Shrewsbury River" (now the Navesink River) along the New Jersey shore. Art historians have described Kensett’s paintings of the river as having evolved from a trip in the fall of 1853 at the invitation of Kensett's friend, author and lecturer George Curtis. However, letters viewable at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website make it clear that Kensett had become acquainted with the area over a year earlier, most likely in connection with fellow artist and friend Thomas Prichard Rossiter.
Kensett and Rossiter had been friends since at least the 1830s. As aspiring artists, they had traveled to Europe together in the 1840s. In 1851 Rossiter married Anna Ehrick Parmly, then in her early 20s, and Kensett attended the wedding. Anna was one of four daughters of Eleazer and Anna Maria Parmly. Eleazer, one of the major figures in American dentistry history, was a wealthy and accomplished member of New York society.
When not in the city, the Parmly family gathered at Bingham Place, a sprawling estate on 275 pastoral acres spanning the peninsula between the Shrewsbury and Navesink Rivers along the New Jersey shore. The Bingham Place estate encompassed much of what is now Rumson, then known as Oceanic, N.J. It was a wide-open landscape of ocean views, orchards, lawns, and cattle-dotted pastures. There the Parmlys opened their doors to family, friends, and the summer breeze.
Rossiter, newly-married into the Parmly family, was likely the reason that Kensett paid a social visit to Bingham Place in the summer of 1852. On July 11, 1852, having reluctantly departed, Kensett wrote Rossiter who was still at Bingham Place:
New York to me now is that of a deserted place…marking a dismal contrast to the green lawns at Bingham Place. I saw the receding shores of Shrewsbury & the line of dust which marked your homeward course & finally the last glimpse of the Locust trees that shade the pleasant mansion & happy inmates at Bingham with any thing but a joyous spirit.
A major figure in the American luminist tradition and one of the most renowned painters of the Civil War era, John Frederick Kensett was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1816. He was the son of Thomas Kensett, a British immigrant engraver, and it was in his father's New Haven firm that Kensett first learned to draw.
After mastering the rudiments of the graphic arts, he worked as an engraver in print shops in New Haven, Albany, and New York throughout the 1830's. During this period, he began to paint on his own, encouraged by a friend and fellow artist, John W. Casilear. In 1838, he made his first submission, a landscape, to the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design.
Desirous of continuing his training, Kensett traveled to Europe in 1840. For the next seven years, often in the company of artists such as Casilear and Asher B. Durand, he painted and sketched in France, England, Italy, and Switzerland. In 1846, he sent several of his Italian landscapes back to New York, the American Art-Union purchasing two of them.
Returning to New York in 1847, Kensett's career soon began to flourish. He was elected an Associate member of the National Academy in 1848 and reached full Academician status only a year later. It was around this time that he began to make summer sketching trips to the Catskills, the White Mountains, and Adirondacks and to the Newport coast, a practice that he would continue throughout his life. Although he later made several journeys to the American West and Europe, he was most drawn to the mountains, lakes, woods, and beaches of the American Northeast.
Kensett's stylistic approach of the 1850's had its basis in the classical, topographically-detailed landscapes of the first generation Hudson River School. However, during the 1860's, he began to take a greater interest in the effects of light, air and atmosphere. He integrated these concerns into quiet, well-structured land and seascapes characterized by tight brushwork and a subdued palette yet endowed with a unique poetic lyricism -- traits that later led one critic to refer to him as "the Bryant of our painters."
This venue, echoed in the work of Kensett's contemporaries -- Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford, and Fitz Hugh Lane -- has since been identified as "luminism." Kensett's landscape subjects ranged from the quiet, woodland interiors of New York and New England to the long, uninhabited shorelines of the Atlantic seaboard, making him the first member of the second generation Hudson River School painters to depict the seashore.
One year prior to his death, he completed an important series of thirty-eight paintings of Long Island Sound which are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
A prolific and popular artist, Kensett was also an active participant in the local and national art life of his day. In 1859, he was appointed to the U.S. Capitol Art Commission. Four years later he helped organize the Sanitary Fair exhibition in support of the Union Troops. He also established the Artists Fund Society (1865) and in 1870 was a founding member of the Metropolitan Museum.
John Frederick Kensett died in his New York studio in 1872.
- Creator:John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872, American)
- Creation Year:circa 1853
- Dimensions:Height: 12 in (30.48 cm)Width: 15 in (38.1 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1841211648672
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